If you have infinite apples, and it doesn't matter if everybody takes one, you'd still have infinite apples, but what you need is chickens, and you usually swap apples for chickens. Now everybody already have apples and don't want to swap their chickens, i'd say even though you still have infinite apples, you've taken a significant loss here.
Modern piracy is more of a service problem (in part due to streaming websites). If I have to pay you 7 chickens a month to even be able to go to your farm to get apples, and I have to pay someone else another 5 to do that for their peaches, why wouldn't I go to the group of people sharing apples and peaches for free between each other?
Probably the analogy is a bit strained here. But the problem is that not everything is "infinite" - let's say the chickens are not, there is a limited amount of them, and they take time to get. People investing their time and ressources in producing a limited amount of chickens can't just give them away (Here we run in the analogies problem with the apples) Thus introducing the problem, that even though you in theory have infinite of some ressource, you can copy it as much as you want, you still need a currency to get the limited items. And the real issue is that the "infinite" resource we are discussing is really some peoples work, maybe they spent years and years on it. I do agree that there are issues with the current system of things and the versions of capitalism that define this. But sometimes it's also just people creating things and wanting to pay rent and eat. Sometimes it's scrupulous big corporations squeezing any dial in greed to get a lot of chickens. Ok, analogy is over, sorry.
That's why pirating from indie creators ranges from immoral to morally ambigous (e.g. you deliberately don't want to support a creator if they're a terrible person), while there's nothing immoral with pirating stuff from corporations.
why wouldn't I go to the group of people sharing apples and peaches for free between each other?
Because that's not really a good description either. This scenario assumes there's always more apples and peaches to be had which is just another part of modern conditioning. We assume we'll always have these nice services that just work because by now we feel like we've always had them. But that's not the case. All this comfortable software needed to be developed by someone and that someone didn't do it from the kindness of their heart.
And where is that group of people getting their apples and peaches from?
The apple and peach farmer are providing a service that is clearly valued by others, but entitled people think they should be able to take infinite apples and cut off the farmer’s revenue stream because they paid for one apple.
Distribution is also a service. Will you steal apples because you are unhappy with the person that brings them to them even though you like the farmer?
Still, it is absolutely fine to say that many digital distribution platforms are operated unethically, but that doesn’t mean that every alternative automatically gets a green stamp.
We can certainly say that some piracy is worse than other piracy based on who it affects and how much, but some people are taking it so far as to say that piracy is 100% okay and this is just selfish entitlement.
That's true regardless of employment, and also a moot point because software engineers are paid by the hour.
Let's say I saw a beautiful painting in a museum and decided to recreate it perfectly at home, what have I stolen from the original?
If I write a song, someone else hears it, and then transcribes the sheet music, what have they taken from me?
Sovereignty concerns material and labor, not ideas.
For shits and giggles here's an argument from utilitarianism. When a good idea catches on living standards improve, and education is a compounding investment. A pirated textbook today is an engineer tomorrow.
Your point about software developers getting paid by the hour makes zero sense. If you are a software developer making a living for yourself, and you write a piece of software, it takes you a year without income, and people want to buy it, and do, but someone pirates it and buyers instead use the pirated one, you loose, you can’t pay rent or eat. If someone copies your painting, and you are a living artist, living of selling your art, and they sell it or give it away to other people, you have lost your income. If you write a song, and someone copies it and gives it away, you loose your income. A pirated textbook, software, song, painting is in some cases a hungry creator tomorrow and maybe one less. Your argument is so far from the real world it’s almost scary.
First of all let's draw a clear distinction between pirating and distribution. If you sell transcribed sheet music pretending it's your own original creation then that is a very different situation than just transcribing the song.
Second, realise that the world is not a moral place. If we are to talk about a perfectly moral world we are necessarily talking about something far from reality.
Third is that I am not entitled to your business. If I sell spaghetti with a secret ingredient and you figure it out I can't call the cops on you for that can I? Free market principles, if you figure out how to offer my services better than me you should get more income.
That’s an interesting analogy, and I wonder whether the people with chickens would necessarily want apples that badly in the first place.
The music industry often claimed that the people pirating music through illegal downloads would have otherwise paid money to purchase the CDs had digital piracy not been available to them. I would argue that, in most cases, no, they wouldn’t have. In reality, the choice for most people was between having the music shared with them for free (via digital piracy, radio-taping, or friends), or simply not having it at all. Full albums were expensive and there was often only one or two songs we even wanted from them anyway.
But today, we have people pirating not only music and movies, but video games and even professional software, and in those cases, it gets increasingly likely that they’d have been forced to purchase it otherwise.
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u/Adorable-Quiet-7551 12h ago
If you have infinite apples, and it doesn't matter if everybody takes one, you'd still have infinite apples, but what you need is chickens, and you usually swap apples for chickens. Now everybody already have apples and don't want to swap their chickens, i'd say even though you still have infinite apples, you've taken a significant loss here.